Victor Davis Hanson: Biden is the most dangerously radical President in US history

is the most radical president that we've had i think in our history hello and welcome to offscript my name is stephen edgington from big business and the fbi to the civil service and the mainstream media many republicans feel their opponents dominate every major institution in america so where is the cultural war heading in the united states and could it spread even further in britain to discuss these topics i'm joined by the american historian and classicist victor davis hanson how optimistic are you for the future of america um guardedly optimistic because the fundamental institutions while they're taxed and they're strained and stressed they haven't broken yet so we're the longest surviving democracy in the world and we're the only constitution that favors a two-party system that's brought stability more or less and if you look at the ingredients of a civilization throughout history there's only about six or seven things that matter one of them is do they have sufficient food supplies we're the largest producer of food if you take away china and that's their data is inexact we were the largest producer of fuel i think we have the ability to do that in short order largest producer of natural gas second largest of coal but largest of oil um your own times education supplement not long ago rated the top i think 20 universities in the world the united states was on i think 15 of them and that was largely not on the basis obviously of our english department our law schools but on tech business medicine things that counted uh we have the largest are the i still think even after the disaster in afghanistan we still have the most adept military so in looking economics we all talk about china even if it were to surpass our gdp in four or five years they have about four times the population more than that so on a rough scale one american is producing amount the number of goods and services as for chinese counterparts so that the essentials are good but we are in one of these civil war 1960s great depression valleys in which the country is divided and [Music] people are trying to destroy the system that gave them their affluence and prosperity whether that's the 180-year filibuster or the 233 year old electoral college or the 60-year 50-year union a 50-state union or the 150-year nine-person supreme court or the constitutional idea that the states have primary responsibilities for setting voting law all of those under assault now because they have not given the social neo-socialist jacobin movement the results that they want let's talk about the man who was allegedly attempting to heal the divisions in america joe biden he ran on an election campaign of supposedly as i say trying to heal those divisions how would you rate him in terms of the history of presidents in america so far well we've had moments where president was so enthieble that people we've never had a president resign for health free so presidents except in the case of richard nixon's do not resign they cling desperately so we're not going to see any president resign nixon only resigned because he felt that he was going to be not just impeached but convicted in the senate and nobody had ever had that happen and nobody's ever had it happen today so his adviser said to him you will be the first person convicted in the senate so he resigned so biden is not going to resign but we've had cases such as grover cleveland for a little bit but mostly woodrow wilson comes to mind where he was so infeeble he was just comatose nearly and that's i think we're getting the point where joe biden is not able to go out and work an eight-hour day like most people and most people 78 have some problems with that all discussions of joe biden hinge on the fact that he's not the joe biden that he was 20 years ago so what i think most of us feel in america now is that he did a faustian bargain with the left that he was a veneer of uh i don't know respectable moderation and he carried the progressive uh agenda across the finish line and then the progressives felt that his task was done and he should sort of recede into the shadows or just sort of mouth their shibalas and that's where we are now he's the most radical president that we've had i think in our history more so than fdr fdr the new deal he tried to pack the court he did all of those things but he didn't do it with a war came and he tried to be inclusive but joe biden on every aspect uh whether it's his appointments his judicial appointments the open border with two million people the skedaddle from afghanistan the deliberate printing of money uh two trillion dollar deficit 30 trillion dollar national debt uh the mandates all of that is is new it's a level of radicalism we haven't seen a long time i don't think we've seen it from a president so as a conservative therefore is this the worst president at least in your lifetime it's hard to make an assessment after 11 months but if certainly if you look at issues about eight or nine issues this president took the largest oil and gas producer in the world that was completely immune from middle east uh pressures and had really given multi-billion dollar subsidies to the commuting middle class by lower energy price he took that and he blew it up we're producing two to three million barrels less we're job owning natural gas producers to produce less we're subsidizing wind and solar as we've never done the result is that i just filled up the other day and gasoline is about double what it was under donald trump and natural gas is more than doubled and that's taken an enormous hit and so when you look at inflation we have not had in 40 years uh six and a half percent annualized rate as we finish december and it's going to go up we've never had in our memory supply chains disruptions uh i flew over the port of la yesterday and uh last month on a commercial flight i've never seen anything like ships out on the horizon without absolute presidential inaction about that we've never had two million people cross the border in one year we've never had a defeat like afghanistan we had something like it in 1975 in saigon but that was a long slow process and we didn't leave 80 the equivalent of 80 billion dollars in the hands of terrorist a billion dollar embassy and 300 million dollar refit of baglam airplay so i could go on but you get the picture so by these rubrics it's hard to find anybody who's done a worse job in the first 11 months what about the central task of his to unite america and heal those divisions that seem so ugly during the last decade joe biden does not want to unite america the left does not want to unite america because they're not democrats they're not liberals they're not even progressive now they are hardcore radicals and they believe that their agenda will never get 50 support of the american people and therefore they have two or three options in which they're uh choosing all of them at once one is to change the system that i just mentioned the institutional system how people gain power the new voting laws or changing the electoral the other is to change the constituency bring in two million people a year from impoverished countries with no high school diploma no marketable skills and offer them immediate federal assistance and then in uh grant them amnesties to vote we're seeing 800 000 illegal aliens probably vote in new york uh local elections and then so they want to change that demography and they want to change the system and they want to use institutions that were nominally neutral i'm talking about the fbi the cia the pentagon the irs the doj each party tried to politicize them but they were they had credibility now with when we look at a john brennan what he did or james clapper or the retired military or mark milley in the pentagon or what the irs does or what the doj did they are now active participants in whether it's climate change or transsexual uh transgendered operations or they women in combat pregnant women as therefore they have a social agenda and then finally they believe they do not need the majority of americans to enact this transition to a radical socialist democracy from a constitutional republic because all the methods that we in the western world use to communicate and disseminate information google searches facebook twitter email they feel they can control it and they can censor and adjudicate who gets to participate the order of a google search to reflect certain agendas and that is force multiplied when you look at professional sports hollywood entertainment k-12 academia wall street the corporate boardroom foundations uh and the print and traditional media they feel they have all of these levers and they can manipulate public opinion or they can gain power through them and they really don't like democracy or democracy in the sense of people being able to vote on referenda notice that they told us when joe biden won that this was a referendum on the beauty and strength of democracy and then when his ref uh his uh polls crashed in august after afghanistan they've never recovered we're told in 2020 democracy is broken or in 2024 there may be a coup or we have to be careful in other words that they they've never liked the people they only consider democracy useful when it promotes their agenda and that's usually that agenda is usually only reified when there's a sense of crisis donald trump something like that 2008 meltdown that's how they come to power there's so much to unpack there and we will do so throughout this interview the first thing i want to mention is americans foreign policy you talked about afghanistan the withdrawal from that obviously was seen as a huge disaster joe biden ran on a record of or ran on a platform sorry of wanting to restore america's image abroad he said america is coming back america is back uh he saw donald trump as a sort of crude uh ignorant person who went around annoying and angering our allies do you think that america has restored its reputation abroad with biden's presidency yeah i do and in ways that joe biden were he in the opposition now and younger and more hail would absolutely agree with we convinced our european and british allies to go in to say afghanistan and they were there for nearly 20 years and they suffered enormous cost casualties not as much as ours but you know they attacked us and not the europeans or the british but they came and so when we decided under joe biden that we were going to get rid of the 3 500 americans and the project was no more viable then the first obligation would have gone to ben to go to our nato allies and say look we're going to withdraw but we came here first and we're going to withdraw last and we suggest that we do this in concert instead we just skedaddled and we left all of our allies defend as they could and then when we had this two-year russian collusion hoax first of all we we lost the russians as a autocratic and untrustworthy as they are and vicious we usually in a real political fashion balance them off with the chinese and i think henry kissinger said neither one should be a better friend to each other than they are to us well we alienated we first appeased putin under biden with reset i mean excuse me with obama under reset and then we came back and we demonized them under russian collusion and the point is that we have an active enemy now and that's okay because putin is no friend of anybody's but if you're gonna polarize and have an active enemy and demonize them then you talk loudly with a twig and you're in trouble and that's what we're doing so we're the nato alliance especially the eastern europeans and the baltic states no longer believe that the nato alliance or the quasi-nato alliance or being a border member of a nato alliance part means anything and i think germany is another good example that is no longer fully a western power anymore in the traditional post-war synth so yeah i think donald trump for all of the criticism he he endured he did create a consortium in the pacific and asia of australia taiwan south korea japan the philippines that were beginning to try to contain this new sort of greater east a greater east asian co-prosperity sphere under chinese auspices but uh the europeans and the westerners got what they wanted because they were even more fiercely anti-trump than were the american left or the american never trump right they wanted that what they got and a lot of us warned them that if you just ignored trump's rhetoric and look what he actually had done he increased nato expenditures by 100 million on military budgeting and he had been very strong with putin he had sold the ukrainians offensive weapons he'd up sanctions on the russians he flooded the world with cheap oil that the russians hated he killed 200 mercenaries in syria that tried to attack a u.s insulation he got out of an asymmetrical missile deal so some of us were thinking you know he's so trying so hard to show that he's not pro putin that he that trump's policies were actually one of the most anti-russian policies we've seen and now we're back to reset appeasement more broadly is the american empire dying it's hard to say i think what's happening is uh under george h.w bush and bill clinton and george w bush and barack obama there was this american-led western effort to say that china and we had a lot of good will toward pre-maoist china because of uh the american relationship with china and the world war ii experience with china we said the more that we are magnanimous to china as it sheds its exoskeleton of communism and fully emerges as a capitalist country they will reciprocate that magnaminity with gratitude and they will become a member of the western democratic community and this is going to be wonderful they're going to be follow a trajectory like india for example and the fact of the matter is they were communist and they never renounced communists they were proud of it and communists looked at magnamini as weakness to be exploited not as kindness to be reciprocated and so that started this empowering china and so all during the 90s and 2000s when you found a professor of computer science that was working for the chinese when you saw ca i operated when you found student that had a cabal that were sending stuff back to china when china was dumping when they were stealing patents when they were stealing um copyrights when they were manipulating their currency that here in the united states it was well we're so strong and we're so powerful we wouldn't want to be racist or xenophobes and attack the chinese and then wuhan came along and you can you can see how ill-prepared we were to deal with the chinese and now we're in a very ridiculous situation of finally waking up and saying we're not going to let while we do this or we're going to have tariffs and the chinese are thinking we've got a bigger we're going to have a bigger economy and we're ahead of you in so many areas in technology and and fabrication and assembly and production uh we just need a few more years with you and then we're done with you and so we're that's what's worrisome we're not as powerful as we were and at some point uh we're going to be a country that's very powerful with 330 million people and but we're not going to run the world as we did in the post-war era and a lot of people in the right left don't don't mind that i'm not sure that i mind that either but it's going to happen and the the enemy of america right now is not poverty or want it's a bi-coastal culture of affluence and leisure and we have staggering amounts of asymmetrical wealth in the the two coastal areas so when you have silicon valley with a 10 square mile area that has five to six trillion dollars of market capitalization then that money is very powerful it can go into a campaign as it did in 2020 400 million dollars plus into getting precincts to vote particular ways so our problem is that we've got a very very globalist cosmopolitan population one with windows on the eu one was windows here on the in the west with asia and they do not believe in traditional american values as we've known them or patriotism or nationalism they feel they're citizens of the world tony blinken remember two months ago said he wanted to invite the the u.n and to adjudicate whether the united states was racist or not and things like that or the international criminal court should be welcomed into to discover whether americans had committed atrocities and when we talk about the international community at the u and we're talking in some cases iran north korea nicaragua cuba the soviet union former soviet union uh china etc etc well i challenge anyone to name a country that hasn't committed atrocities in its past um you've described recently the democrats as revolutionaries why would they want a revolution if they control every single institution or major institution in america i've never known any revolutionary who said we want it's now time to stop the the revolution by definition on the left is defined as uh today's revolutionary is tomorrow's counter-revolutionary so i guess what i'm saying is that uh it's inherent for revolutionaries to want more revolution and to get more and more radical and uh they do control the institutions and they do control uh at times the government but they don't have the majority of the american people and so now they're 50 50 even with all the terrible things that happened to trump the hoax the impeachments the january they still couldn't get more than 50 senators and they have a narrow margin in the house they're going to lose both in two years i think they know it and that's why they're talking about coups and everything and they have a good chance of losing the president that's what worries them this if you look at a map of the united states and you see two blue strands on the coast and then one around austin and one around the great lakes and that represents about 48 of the population and then the entire country is red in between ninety percent of the geography and about fifty one or fifty two percent of the people that's what they're worried about and the problem they have is that where things are made oil food transportation factories they don't control any of that and so what we're seeing now is two million people in the last two years have left blue enclaves illinois california massachusetts new york and gone to places of the old confederacy you know i can't believe it but they're going to tennessee they're going to texas or they're going up to wyoming or montana or utah etc so they're afraid that their blue state paradigm of high taxes big government uh appeasement of criminal that homelessness that doesn't work for liberals so they're in crisis right now and they're afraid they're losing the majority of people they don't know how to stop it and what i meant was any sane person would look go into joe biden's office and say you've got to close the border finish the wall this is killing us or you can't keep printing two trillion dollars and paying people to stay home this is killing us or you've got to restore deterrence abroad or our allies are going to become finland like countries they'll have no choice but they're not going to do that they double down i'm glad you mentioned the sort of geography of america the demography of how uh on both coasts you've got these very strong sort of democrat you know states and as you say many people are going from the blue states to the red states what do you think of this idea of a secessionist movement within the republican party who feel that the democrats are so anathema to everything america stands for and the fact that they control every major institution means that there's no option left then to create your own country of just red states and i'm going to quote from a radio host called jesse kelly and i want you to respond so he's he wrote that there is simply no common ground with the left anymore we are now a couple screaming at each other all night every night as the kids hide in their room we cannot come together but we do not have to be like this the history of the world is nations breaking up and redrawing their borders if we want to avoid this political divide turning into a deadly one we should do likewise we did that once and that didn't work out very well uh and the problem is that when i mentioned red and blue it's true but what happens to somebody like me in a blue state california and what i meant is that california's got 40 million people and we've got about 15 million that are conservative and if you go to the geography of california and you go north of san francisco which is larger than most states up to the oregon border or along the sierra nevada foothills or the great central valley of 400 miles or the inland empire the people who live there are more conservative than people in utah i live in fresno county i can tell you that people here are all armed they don't go to san francisco they don't trust their kids going to the coastal universities they don't like people from the coast but they're in california and there are places of blue enclave like austin in the middle of texas so it's not so easy but more importantly i think conservatives and why i disagree with the radio host is i think that we're starting to win now and i'm talking from an area that's 95 percent mexican-american this was ground zero of illegal immigration donald trump got 45 of the latino vote here and mexican-american males 52 because abortion on demand transgenderism in the schools and the anathema for people in that community they like to be militarily strong they're coming into the middle and upper middle classes they're angry at the price of energy they're terribly angry at the taxes considered what they get in exchange they don't want open borders i've talked to so many people and they say my mom's on dialysis why would i want a bunch of people from oaxaca to come here and crowd these services and so they're starting to lose their constituencies they're losing suburban voters who are now upset about crime they're losing minorities who feel that they're being talked down to by elite white bi-coastal professionals and academics whose culture they they are poor so i would rather work at getting a majority of americans and i think it's happening and donald trump sort of kicked in this door and then people found out you could appeal to the deplorables you could get tough on china you could close the borders you really didn't need optional military engagements when you were facing existential enemies like china and so that opened a lot of avenues and we have more and more uh republican and conservative candidates that kind of refuted the old john mccain romney we have to open the door a border or hispanics won't like us uh we've got to get china into the world community by giving them more concessions let's write off the assembly manufacturing we don't do that here in america anymore so um i i think there's a good opportunity in this midterms to see a correction of the of a magnitude we saw in 2010 or 1994 maybe 50 to 70 seats and i think we could win back the senate and at that point joe biden will be if he's still in office will be relegated to just an executive order president barking at the moon because he doesn't have the charisma or the cognitive ability at this point that barack obama did when he lost both houses of congress does it matter when you vote in republicans because many would argue that the left's domination of big tech of the media of almost as i mentioned earlier every institution from the fbi downwards means that simply when you elect these politicians they they can actually impact very little and the other argument that some trump supporters would say as well is that even when you're electing certain republicans they simply support the same system that they believe to be working these kind of bush era republicans so do you think that there's any point in in winning these elections in any case there has to be a point but you're you've sort of outlined exactly what i wrote in the book the dying citizen in the chapter of the unelected i said we have two million people in the federal workforce and 40 percent of americans work for some form of government and we have these unelected people an anthony fauci a mark milly a lois lunar the irs a james clapper and andrew mccabe uh james comey and they they exercise judicial executive and legislative power on their own and administrations and centers come and go but they stay and they have to be held accountable and they lie under oath we know that clapper did we knew that comey feigned on her oath 245 times he couldn't remember robert mueller didn't know what the steele dossier was apparently even though it was the center of his investigation etc etc and so we have to hold those people accountable and your other point is is valid that when you have the traditional blue blood silk stocking republican wing that's in that new york washington nexus they're so integrated with the left whether they're supreme court judges or whether they're senior senators or even administrations that they feel that they have more in common culturally and socially with their counterparts than they do with their ideological allies supposedly in the midwest or something so a lot of us have talked about that how you how do you stop that and one of them is i think it would be we it seems simple but you can break up washington i don't know why the fbi is in washington it should be in kansas city i don't know why the department of agriculture is in washington it should be in fresno or texas somewhere and if you broke up a lot of those nexuses especially in the age of electronic communications like skype resume it would really help and that um you go i think we also really need to look at antitrust legislation anti-monopoly legislation when you have google running 90 of the searches or social media is controlled by twitter and facebook so there's things that we can do if we have a republican party that's not compromised and for all practical purposes let's be frank if you are a republican today and you want to run for congress and you want to run for the senate almost anywhere you're not going to be able to run on a john mccain mitt romney agenda and the people who tried it like liz cheney they're going to lose she's going to lose in wyoming and she's from an ancient family there that has enormous influence and power and a network of supporters and she's got a huge nationwide fundraising apparat and she's going to lose and so i think that the republican party finally is shedding this image that it's a bunch of white guys on the golf course putting around and talking about capital gains and privatizing social security and it's a party of the middle class in contrast to the democratic party that despises the white working class we know but really the entire working class and is a party of very very wealthy people the bill gates the warren buffets the zuckerbergs the bloombergs and then the subsidized lower middle class and poor and so they don't care about the middle class they feel they lack the romance of the poor and they don't have the cultural sophistication of the wealthy and they make fun of them on 360 degrees 24 7. uh you know these are the deplorables because i'm quoting biden and obama and hillary these are irredeemable deplorable and john mccain call them the crazies so they have a whole language of disparagement for them it's fascinating you're seeing these exact same trends in the united kingdom where yes more uh working-class voters are now voting for the conservatives by a huge margin uh than voting for the labor party for all the same reasons i'm curious as well there's i just find their rhetoric so fascinating those on the left when they talk about things like we live in an era of white supremacy uh we need to end all racism these seem to be very lofty goals but where does this sort of end when when is white supremacy ended when is racism ended where does this revolution never ends for them well this is my question what is their aim i don't really understand i think part of it is psychological in two way ways and this is kind of a a tired trope but i do think there's something to it that when somebody loses any sense of transcen uh you know transcendence that you don't believe that there's something after this world or there's powers in this world that cannot be calibrated that require faith then you find you have an inner human need for that and for the left that are atheist and agnostic their religion is getting in your face and forcing you to be better person whether that's on the climate or race and that explains the frenzy the other thing is more i'm not a freudian or a youngin but there is something to the idea that we have create if you go to palo alto california where i work or you go up to woodside or atherton or hillsbale or the upper west side of new york are suburbs of cambridge massachusetts or austin texas the bluest of the blue places they're almost all portland the most radical city united states is 96 percent white so what i'm getting at is a lot of these very wealthy white people feel more comfortable with white people and they feel terrible that they feel more comfortable so in the abstract they hunt out supremacy and racism and white privilege but in the concrete it never affects where their kids go to school who they have over for dinner who they associate with the minor exception that a very elite level of minorities who they feel comfortable with but they do not want to be with a middle class uh uh white or non-white and most of the non-white or middle class so they create this constructed caring and i i've seen it so much on the stanford campus where i see these white kids and if they really believed in helping minorities they'd come down here to fresno or bakersfield in tudor or they would send their kids to cal state fresno or cal state turtle but when you look at how they live they're the most pretentious uh envious status conscious people in the world and they don't want to be around anybody but themselves and they feel terrible about just look at the luminaries of the current democratic party nancy pelosi lives in a huge home in san francisco in a gated napa valley palazzo gated mark zuckerberg has a 50 000 square foot home on hawaii with a wall they hate walls they say they don't work barbara streisand all of these people down on the pch in malibu same thing so when you look at the schools they they they worship and it's very funny they're all talking about we need not just proportional representation for college admissions but what they call now uh things like equity admission or repertory admission so if you're african-american you're not going to be let in regardless of your credentials at 12 of the incoming yale or harvard or stanford class but maybe 15 or 18. but when you look at the the numbers and the same is true for latinos there's only one rubric you can cut and that's white males because you're 55 women anyway and you're getting white males that are 33 of the population down to about 15 and who does that hit if they're not a legacy you're not a multi-millionaire to give the money to buy your way in it hits the children of the white professional classes and so what are they doing right now and i can attest this from firsthand knowledge they are calling up the admissions they are calling up a dean they're calling up a pro my kid didn't get into stanford or heart what am i gonna do this is terrible i didn't think diversity would do this to me or they're getting carjacked in portland or somebody took their catalytic converter in minneapolis so they can't go to downtown seattle i didn't think that this was going to happen to me or the sorry else d.a that they voted for let out somebody that just broke into their home and so that's this was all i don't want to say it was a game but this was sort of revolutionary chic and now the frankenstein monster they created is going after them and they don't like it so they project all of these uh pathologies onto other people because they suffer them themselves is america a sort of victim of its own success after the cold war when you won that war the soviet union collapsed america people were talking about the end of history as you mentioned quite rightly um christianity religion has declined mostly in western countries as we become richer so people feel that there's no ideological enemy and that there's no god anymore that they can look to as a sort of purpose so this kind of meaning in their life is having to be filled with very odd radical ideologies i think that's pretty much sums it up that and that's was sort of the warning at the very beginning there was a reason that aristotle and plato and many of the stoics we would call them conservative or right wing or maybe the roman nihilists uh swatonius petronius tacitus were kind of that way to and they all had a common and i don't want to get into the german neolis but because i don't really approve of them i don't like them but hegel and nietzsche and spangler they all have a similar theme that when you combine market capitalism or free markets with constitutional government it puts an enormous onus on the citizen to not do what he's materially and legally able to do and that what the romans call luke luksas are decadents and so if you don't have a religious concept or religious community or family support network or a small town shame culture and you've got all this money and all this freedom human nature being what it is there's no breaks on your appetites so here we are when the very economic frap fabric the agricultural fabric the energy fabric the four and paul are all stressed out but when you look at the upper middle classes and the wealthy what are they doing and you look at the popular culture magazines and blogs they're enjoying a level of indulgence it's it's just you know whether it's john kerry flying all over the world in his private jet to combat uh climate change or you know mark zuckerberg's latest acquisition or bill gates buying two hundred thousand acres reminds me of tramalchio and petronius the satiricon so that was always a a fear of what this was and when you mentioned the uk there was no reason why it would be different than ours or we'd be different than the uk because you have the same ingredients at work a very sophisticated and stable form of government and a free market even under your socialism a free market economy and a lot of people are getting very wealthy and they're very free and they don't believe in anything more than themselves and they're indulgent and they're at war with less well-off people in the interior and the hinterland that are more traditional and they despise those people it doesn't go the other way the the traditionalist in the west doesn't really hate this coastal uh globalist elite they just feel that they're misled they don't want to be around them that elite hates the interior and wakes up every morning say what did i do to curb those people and then they go to bed saying i don't do enough so it's they're incessant i'm glad you mentioned the uk because obviously i live here and i study uk politics all the time and what's fascinating is that in 2016 we had a similar political revolution to the united states we had this brexit referendum and in many ways that opened the door for a political and economic revolution obviously we're leaving this huge trading block which uh had so much power over our laws and over our lives uh and yet it doesn't seem to me that in britain we've had the same kind of culture war or same kind of political revolution as you've had in the united states and in particular conservatives here seem to be far more happy with the situation in which institutions are run by our ideological opponents than in america and i'm just curious to know what we could learn from conservatives in the united states and you know for example there's some great grassroots movements within education you saw glenn younkin's election recently in virginia and parents who are going to school boards and and arguing against so-called woke ideologies being taught to their uh kids i'm really really interested in what british conservatives can learn from americans in how to combat this stuff i think one of the things that conservatives learned and they didn't not that they're particularly original but they are brave and they're they are traditional and they've learned that the new coastal leftist elite is not your old democrat your hubert humphrey or even your bill clinton but they're elitist and they're revolutionaries and they don't like the middle class so what conservatives have been doing is when you look at those tapes of the virginia parents the first thing that strikes you is there's an afghan refugee yelling at the school board there's an iranian refugee there's a taiwanese american that so the conservative movement said we're in the middle class now and we can we're the majority and we want anybody to come in here to attack these people who are ruining our uh country and we don't have to have exactly the same agendas but if you're mexican-american and you don't want your daughter and salinas to be told that she's really a man from this spoiled brat white teacher that you know came out of uc santa cruz then join us and if you're living in the inner city and you're an african-american and and you're armed to protect your family from nightly shootings you have a right to be armed that's your constitutional protection so conservatives found a populist message that transcended race and replaced it with a class conscience it's a little bit more difficult in britain because your class consciousness was always more extreme in the sense that we were more upwardly more mobile and you had kind of a class system so you had people who were very resentful it was that old metaphor in the united states if you saw a cadillac in the 1960s you went over to the guy and goes how much did it cost how could i get one great car if you saw one in britain you wanted to kick it and so it's it's harder in britain but i think british conservatives could try to enlist people that the left through their open door policy thought would be permanent constituents and they actually come from traditional cultures some of them that can be can be inclusive and included and when that happens you'll be surprised how quickly a lot of the people on the left will not want open borders i noticed that we had about 80 000 cubans that wanted to come here and the biden administration stopped that on day one and they do not want anybody coming united states from venezuela or cuba they just do not want it and they they're open about it they want people from you know the caribbean or from not from northern mexico from southern mexico indigenous people who might be good revolutionary fodder for them the woke movement according to some is simply a fad they argue that their ideas are fundamentally flawed and unsustainable they go against human nature do you think that it will simply sort of wash away over the next few years in a very uh quick way like mccarthyism did or is locusm here to stay well it uh just because an idea is contrary to human nature bolshevism was contrary to human nature and that's what the the roman i mean the russian aristocracy said you know we can kind of hang around with karinsky a little bit or we can give a nod to linen but we're here to stay and it's going to pass and it didn't even though they had no support among the people so bad ideas that have minority support can be very quickly institutionalized if they use the necessary means to get there so this is a revolutionary neo-marxist socialist movement jacob movement they have no public support that's true it's contrary to human nature but that does not mean they will not be successful in implementing it in the schools in the popular culture if they're not challenged once they're challenged and once you're bold about it and say you know you can cancel me you can do anything you want it has no effect on me and people start doing that it will collapse i i'm kind of a pessimist about human nature i think these things i grew up you know as a kid during the 60s and saw that every time about every 20 years in the west there's sort of this fad you know these this hysteria satan witch trial mccarthy metoo black lives matter where they start out with maybe an understandable worry and then they go completely crazy in a mass of consensual society and then the traditionals have to put it down and it's kind of like mowing the lawn you you can't let it go out but so i don't think the wokeness is uh is going to stay but it it could stay if people don't resist it everybody that that you talk to now in the united states has had it with it so a lot of these movements keep going and keep going and keep going it's like a car that ran out of gas and you put it in neutral on a coast and so it's coasting now but the ingredients black lives matter is totally discredited the founder of it ms cuellar's got her fourth home she moved to white to hawk canyon first thing she built was a 35 000 security fence blm came out and said this is racist jesse smallett is innocent this was a real attack i mean they completely gone jumped the shark as we say and they're they're discredited and me too died when tara reed came out of the woodwork and said this man who's going to be present sexually assaulted me and here's a witness and all the people that said women must be believed said not this woman he's the only guy we got so that's what will happen but we as traditionalists have a duty to our forebear forebearers and our children to stop this because it will do a lot of damage and it has done a lot of damage and i have no patience with a lot of people on the conservative side that never trump right who feel that uh they can continually harp on january 6 or donald trump said this or that you know it's almost like there's a little bit of smoke in the kitchen and i'm going to get out of the hou when the whole house is on fire and they don't really care about that and they they gave us joe biden in a close election so uh this idea that we're all going to play by the marcus of queensbury rules and if you don't then your whole side is discredited that's nice and normal times but right now we have an existential threat and everybody according to the station has to speak out against it and if you don't do that then you're aiding and abetting what will be a revolutionary takeover of the western world victor davis hanson thank you so much

Channel: The Telegraph

Views: 2,599,469

Keywords: Telegraph, News, victor davis hanson, vdh, fox news, hoover institution, trump, victor davis hanson wokeness, victor davis hanson joe biden, victor davis hanson trump, joe biden, politics, freedom, donald trump, history, the case for trump, america, hanson, hoover institute, victor davis, military history, foreign policy, liberty, equality, constitution, woke, biden, wokeness, president, middle class, victor hanson, public debate, policy debate, joe biden media spin, joe biden image

Id: jdkca09EHRI

Length: 47min 53sec (2873 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 04 2022